Why Can't I
by Blue Myst
Summary: Angel grasps for anything she can reach in order to feel like she has a place in the world she hardly knows. However, that grasp may be too tight... (loose songfic around Liz Phair's "Why Can't I")
1. Exchange of Feelings

_Why can't I breathe whenever I think about you?_

---

Angel sighed, burying her face in her hands.  _I want to remember... I want to know who I am, where I came from... all the important parts of a person's psyche that almost everyone else in existence takes for granted._

Rubbing at her eyes, she glanced up at the star-studded night sky.  _It's so beautiful... and yet there's a war going on out there, even as I look at it.  People fighting, killing, dying... at least, for now, those I actually know aren't out there.  Yet._

Her breath caught in her throat at the idea of losing them... at losing _him...  _I shouldn't think about him so much.  He's so busy; he hardly has any time for me.  For what he promised me.__

The young amnesiac fell back against the grass and put her hands behind her head. _ It's better that I'm out here, not bothering anyone, staying out of everyone's way.  I don't know anything, and I never will._

"Angel?" a voice called out softly.

She sat up and watched a figure walk toward her.  "Hi, Diandre."

"What are you doing out here?"

"Just looking at the stars."

"Is that all?"

Angel's eyes hardened slightly.  "Well, if you must know, I was thinking, too."

"May I ask what you were thinking about?" the princess queried, taking a seat next to the young woman.

"Sure, you can ask.  I might not tell you, though."

Diandre stiffened briefly, then relaxed and chuckled softly.  

"What brought you out here, anyway?"

"I was wondering where you went."

"Why?"

"Because I hadn't seen you for a while, stupid.  By the Light, why do you diss yourself so much?"  

"I have no place here, thus I feel that I don't belong here."

"And why don't you supposedly have a place here?"

"I can't do much to help you all," she replied, shrugging.  "Everyone else has a place... I don't.  I just kind of fell out of the sky, or something, and landed here.  I don't even know what I'm doing here, or why I haven't run off."

"Where would you go?"

"I don't know."  A heavy sigh escaped her lips.  "I wish I did."

The princess nodded, then looked westward at the faintly glowing horizon as the last traces of the sun's presence faded away.  "I used to have no place either, Angel.  I knew who I was, and where I had come from, but still, I had no place.  Not in my own home, that is."

Angel blinked.  "What do you mean?"

"My father blamed me for my mother's death, and that attitude leaked to my two eldest brothers.  Gavin was the only one who was nice to me, and that only happened when no one else was around.  He didn't want me to be alone, but he didn't want everyone else to be mad at him, so he tried to please both.  If it hadn't been for him, and some of my extended family members... I don't think I'd be alive right now."

"Why?"

Diandre turned and held Angel's gaze.  "I would have killed myself."

She flinched back from the steel in the younger girl's eyes.  "Oh.  ... Are you glad you didn't?"

"I wouldn't have met you if I had, right?"  The princess stood and dusted a few blades of grass off her pantleg before walking back toward the palace.

Angel watched her leave, shocked into silence.  _Did she mean that she was actually _glad _she had met me?_  "Wait," she called out.

Diandre stopped and turned, a smile turning up one corner of her mouth.  "Yes?"

"Can I, uh... well... what can I do to help?"

"You can follow me, for starters.  There are just some things around here that I can't do on my own.  However," she continued, a twinkle in her eye barely noticeable, "the last one there is a pile of pond scum!"

"Hey!" Angel exclaimed as the younger girl took off for the nearby building at a dead run.  Laughing, she dashed after her down the hill.


	2. Loss for Words

_Why can't I speak whenever I talk about you?_

---

The young amnesiac scrubbed at her eyes the next day, tired from staring at glowing data screens all morning.

"Ready for a break?" Diandre asked.

Angel nodded. "Boy, am I ever."

"Let's go grab something to eat."

"Sounds good."

The two stood, stretched, then walked out the door toward the dining hall. There they ran into Ryan, Diandre's youngest older brother. "Hey you two -- how goes the data analysis?" he asked, glancing up from his meal.

"Eh, it's...tedious," his sister replied, sitting down next to him after pointing Angel to the vacant seat on her other side. 

"You can say that again," Angel agreed, scrubbing at her eyes again.

Ryan laughed. "You know, you can turn down the lighting on those monitors, or turn up the lighting in the room."

Diandre and Angel looked at each other sheepishly, prompting another laugh from the prince. "So, ah, what have you been up to today?" the princess queried, trying to change the subject.

Her brother lightly punched her shoulder, playfully telling her he realized what she was doing. "Oh, just this and that -- if you guys need a break but still want to do stuff, want to come with me to go check out the _Viper?"_

"That old rust bucket?" Diandre exclaimed.

"Hey now -- you just have to see what they've done with it. It hardly looks like a Lancer anymore."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Where's it stationed at, again?" she asked as a servant came by with plates of food for herself and Angel, who began eating quietly.

"In geosynchronous orbit around Neptune -- it's right on the horizon, so you can only really see the beauty of one side of it, but it's more than enough to amaze even you, sis."

"Nice... Angel, you know what a Lancer is, right?"

"I think so -- that's the ship that was made by the Empire way back when to combat snubfighter attacks, right?"

"Exactly."

"So, uh, Ryan... what did they do to this ship to make it so much better?"

"Oh, they added completely new hull armor twice the strength of the old, plus new and more advanced shield generators. They also took the engines off and added an elongated cargo/hangar bay to the aft before replacing the engines with completely new ones."

"My stars, how much did this cost?"

"Eh... a pretty credit. But with all the resources we've mined off the planets in this system, it's not too bad. Besides, since individual companies do a lot of the mining, we finance our own enterprises with taxes from their profits."

"If others are mining too... where do they get their profits from?"

"Ever since our mother's speech to the New Republic years back, we've gained an incredible amount of contacts -- most of our treasury's money comes from business dealings with NR systems."

"And where do all these dealings, uh, happen? They aren't really allowed here, right?"

Ryan nodded. Angel was stunned at how much he resembled his next oldest brother with that action. "The system neighboring ours is mostly uninhabited save for one moon with an outpost city and space station orbiting that moon. We conduct dealings on the station, and goods are transferred either on the station or by direct linking of our ships in orbit around the moon."

"Interesting... there's quite the operation going on here, isn't there?"

"You can say that again."

Angel would have inquired further, but Gavin walked into the room at that moment. She froze, then suddenly became very interested in her food. He looked at her curiously before taking a seat on Ryan's free side. "How's lunch today?"

"Excellent," his younger brother replied. 

"Nice," he replied, his gaze wandering back to Angel. Abruptly he stood. "I just remembered something I need to take care of -- I'll be back for lunch in a bit." Without another word Gavin turned and left the room.

"That was odd..." Ryan mumbled around a mouthful of food.

Diandre nodded. Their other companion remained silent, nearing completion of her meal.  "You all right, Angel?" she asked.

"Yeah. Fine."

"Is something wrong between you and my brother?" the young man queried. "He looked at you funny."

"I...I don't know. We don't talk much. How could there be something wrong?" she said hastily, a nervous laugh ending her sentence.

"Uh...okay."

Angel finished her food and stood. "Yeah, yeah, everything's fine...fine..." she murmured to herself, barely within earshot of the other two. She shook her head and exited the room in a different direction than Gavin had taken.

"Well, that was weird," Ryan declared, leaning back in his chair. "Any clue to all of that, Diandre?"

"Sort of...but I'm not really sure."

"Okay. Maybe you should have Gavin talk to her, or something. It seems like they need it."

"I don't want to be nosey or pushy, though."

"Wouldn't it be better if they both were able to focus better on the task ahead? Gavin's been acting somewhat funny at times lately anyway -- I wonder if this has anything to do with it."

"It might be a good idea..."

"Besides, you know Angel better than I do. I'll mention it to Gavin--"

"Nah, I'll take care of it. It'd be better if only one person got involved. Don't worry, I'll keep you updated."

"Thanks, sis." The pair got up after finishing and wandered toward one of the hallways.  Impulsively Ryan gave his only sister a hug. "I'll never say this enough, but you're awesome, you know that?"

Diandre returned the embrace and smiled gently up at him. "Thanks. And don't worry, I've put all that behind me... mostly, anyway."

"Well, just hit me if I start acting like I used to."

She laughed. "I'll take you up on that."

"Hey...don't use it as an excuse to beat me up!"

"Me? Beat _you_ up?"

He stared at her for a moment before bursting out laughing. Diandre joined him, and their laughter carried down the hallway they walked through.


	3. Never Easy

_It's inevitable_

_It's a fact that we're gonna get down to it..._

---

Angel walked with her head down through the palace corridors, wandering with no particular destination in mind.  Her mind was elsewhere anyway.  

Her heart jumped when she ran right into something.  Looking up to identify the object, the young woman was stunned to see none other than the focus of her thoughts standing before her.  "...Hi."

"Hi."

Tearing her eyes away from his, she stepped around him and resumed her earlier pace.  Immobilized by something he could not identify, Gavin watched her leave helplessly.  _Idiot_, a voice in the back of his mind shouted.

_I know, I know... but what can I say?  It was a stupid promise, since it's more than I could ever_ handle..._  The crown prince of Byrista sighed heavily and started heading toward the dining hall once again._

* * *

"Hey, Gavin," Diandre's voice sounded behind him hours later, snapping him out of a doze he had fallen into while going over the latest data on the enemy forces.

"Hi," he yawned.

His sister chuckled as she pulled up a chair and sat next to him.  "Fell asleep, huh?"

"Yeah," he admitted, stifling another yawn.

"Have you not been sleeping well?"

"Not really... there's a lot of stuff on my mind."

"Like what?  Maybe it'll be less heavy if you share," she said, sticking her tongue out at him.

He grinned lopsidedly at her.  "That's a new way to order me to tell you what I'm thinking about?"

"Order?"

"Okay, maybe it's more like 'forcefully request' or something."

Diandre mulled that over for a moment.  "That works, I suppose."

"Well, I'm _so_ glad to have _that cleared up."_

She wrinkled her nose at him.  "Anyway... what's up?"

"Oh... just been thinking about that promise I made Angel.  The one about helping her find her past and stuff."

"Not easy, is it?"

"No, it's not... I'm so busy, and I don't even know where to start, anyway.  And I think she's really been banking on me doing something, or so it seems.  The longer this goes on, the stranger she acts around me... and the more uncomfortable I feel around her."

"Do you like her?"

Gavin arched an eyebrow.  "Haven't you learned anything from your diplomacy tutor?"

"Of course I have, but why would I use those skills on family?" she bantered, grinning impishly.

Her brother raised his hands in surrender.  "Okay, okay, you win."  His face sobered.  "But... I don't know.  I care about her and stuff, but it's not a matter of 'like,' I think."

"Ah.  You should talk to her about it."

"It's not that easy..."

"Actually, it is.  The hard part is the whole setting up a time to meet and actually doing it.  Once you start talking... it should be better."

"Should?"

"The odds are for it.  There's always an off chance that something bad will come from it, but will it get any better if you sit back and do nothing?"

"Good point."

Diandre stood.  "Go for it, bro.  Frankly, I'm getting tired of watching the way you two act around each other."

Gavin blinked.  "Like I said..."

"And like I said, I don't use that stuff on family members."  She smiled at him before walking out the door.  "Good luck."

"Thank you."

* * *

After dinner that evening, Gavin approached Angel.  He had hardly eaten, since butterflies filled his stomach.  _This is Angel we're talking about_, he reminded himself.  _She's not the Emperor or anything_.  For some reason, however, this train of thought did little to calm his nerves.

The young woman looked up at him with a mix of apprehension and curiosity as he came up.  "What is it?"

"Uh... can we talk?"

She blinked.  "Sure."

"Somewhere... alone."

Her agreement was slower in coming this time.  "All right..."

Gavin nodded and headed out of the room, motioning Angel to follow.


	4. Path Change

_So tell me_

_Why can't I breathe whenever I think about you?_

---

Angel sat down, a myriad of emotions running through her heart.  _What in space is this all about?_

Gavin took a seat across from her, and inhaled deeply before speaking.  "We haven't really been getting along that well lately, have we?"

She shook her head fractionally, her eyes openly curious about where he was going with this.

"Well, uh... I've been thinking a lot, and... I'm sorry for having promised you what I did.  I can't do it, not now, not with what's going on."

Angel stared at him in disbelief for a moment.  Then her eyes flashed.  Gavin had not expected that.  "So you... you... you're going to brush me aside so you can focus more on this upcoming war?  That's all I am to you, a distraction?"

"No..."

"I don't know who I am!  I don't know why I am the way I a--"  She cut herself off.

"Why you are... what?"

"Nothing," she spat.

Anger flared in him.  "If you're not going to tell me anything, and all you're going to do is be a whiny, selfish, narrow-minded human being like you've been almost all along, then there's no reason for me to help you.  Why would I want to help _that?"_

Her eyes widened.  "Why you... you bastard!"  Enraged, the young woman dashed out of the room.

Gavin fell back in his chair, stunned at what had just transpired.  _Why did I just go off like that...?  This will never heal now...  He blinked as an image came to him.  _Were those... tears... in her eyes?__

* * *

Angel sprinted toward her room, rage and pain fighting for supremacy in the turmoil of emotions that made up her heart.  Her breath came in gasps.  _I'm in okay shape... but why..._  A memory smacked her in the face.  _Oh, right.  It's happening again.  I think about... about him_... and I can't breathe... what is he to me?  Why do I think about him so much?__

She reached her room, opened the door, and fell onto her bed.  _I need to... yes_.  Scrubbing at her eyes, the young amnesiac set herself to her task, resolving to never look back.


End file.
